Maxim D. Shrayer’s voice speaks across generations. With a stubborn belief that poetry must be healing, Shrayer writes poems that break through boundaries and fears, accept defeat, and yearn for pleasure. As morally serious and utterly sincere as these poems are, they are also filled with abhorrence, loathing, odium, and contempt. If humankind is to survive, Shrayer argues in this new collection, then it will do so with all the complexities of humankind: love, murder, kindness, torture, propaganda, and poetry.
–David Biespiel, author of A Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love

“I have nothing to immolate/ except my memory/ but memory doesn’t burn,” so writes the Russian-born American Jew, scholar and translator, refusenik and son of refuseniks, poet and son of a poet, professor and student of life Maxim D. Shrayer. The memories he carries burn in carefully crafted verses as if to contain his furies and his love. Poems born since October 7, poems of Israel and the old Soviet Union, an imagination that can bring Nabokov to size up Putin, but can also relish the sweetness of concord grapes in Massachusetts. Th ese are poems to savor and to learn.
–Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022


Maxim D. Shrayer’s Zion Square is a book of unabashed loyalties, outspoken in its political commitments, at moments bitingly satiric, at others, tender. Th e central question is one of home; at once diasporan and Zionist, the poems constantly seek the place where roving heart and mind can be at peace. Moving among the Eastern Europe of the poet’s heritage and early life, cosmopolitan Western Europe, Boston and Cape Cod where he has put down roots, and Israel, his soul-home, the poems circle around an unease that contains the kernel of its own cure. “An immigrant Russian Jew/eager to live off his small property,” Shrayer counts his blessings as the poems mingle hellos and goodbyes, sometimes paradoxically as what seemed past penetrates the present. An Old World melody, sweet, rueful, rises up above the ubiquitous rhetorical din of our moment.
–Natania Rosenfeld, author of The Blue Bed

Born in Moscow to a Jewish-Russian family with Ukrainian and Lithuanian roots, and a refusenik for more than eight years, Maxim D. Shrayer has lived a life containing much anguish. Still, his memorably polished verse in Zion Square gleams like the grapes in his poem “Grapes of Sukkot,” that “shine upon us/ like our ancestors’ desert stars.” With carefully-observed details, Shrayer’s poems summon up both history and its calamities as well as tender moments, as when the speaker in “Two Octaves for My Father” asks, “Remember, how the oak leaf spiraled,/ desperately, into mom’s open hand?” Many of Shrayer’s poems address, with desperation and despair, a world in painful conflict and chaos. Yet there is compassion in his poems, which tell us that the speaker has “nothing to immolate / except my memory” because “like a broken prayer/ memory won’t leave the Jew alone.” These haunted poems movingly try to make sense of our current world that is, Shrayer passionately reminds us, seeped in tragedy.
–Yerra Sugarman, author of Aunt Bird